The car bloc is 95% of the population and is completely rational. It makes no sense to take entire lanes out of service for the tiny minority of people who can integrate biking into their daily commute. And for most people in the US, public transit is not an option because you have a last mile problem at both the starting point and ending point.
Consider, as an ironic example, the new development around DC’s New Carrolton metro station, where WMATA, DC’s subway operator, will have a major office. Although it is a metro stop, it’s not practically commutable by metro. Almost all of the housing in the area is outside walking distance from the station, and it would make no sense to live in the city (where the rent is very expensive and the schools are bad) and take metro when you could live in the surrounding suburbs and drive 15 minutes to work instead. This is a problem endemic to the US—because we put large employment centers in the suburbs (like Silicon Valley) we end up with suburb-suburb commutes with last mile problems at both ends. It kills transit and biking as viable options.
Public transit is viable when your cities look like New York or Chicago. You put a little train station in a walkable/bikeable suburb, and then put all the jobs downtown. Most post-WWII cities don’t look anything like that. In those cities, it’s entirely rational to cater primarily to cars, because most people couldn’t use public transit and biking even if they wanted to.
Small folding e-bikes solve that “last mile” problem for lots of people.
They allow people to quickly reach mass transit hubs when none are near by, fold up and hop on. What’s missing is normalisation and support from transit providers.
I’d add, that it would be nice if Google/Apple would add multi-mode transit routing for maps so that you could tell when it’s quicker to cycle direct and when it’s quicker to cycle to a station and catch a train or bus.
Hold on, metro/subway capacity isn't the issue being addressed by the parent comment.
You raised the problem of metro stations being further than a walkable distance on either end of the commute.
If a subway or train service is at standing room only capacity right now even before you help new people to get to it then it's kind of a moot point anyway; you need more capacity before you can add more people.
The economics of train routes are dictated by how many paying customers you can move per hour. If everyone carried a portable bike, you would increase the potential user base of the routes, but decrease the customers/hour. (When trains are near full, and to be economically viable, they need to be, loading/unloading becomes a major bottleneck and everyone carting around a portable bike would really slow that down.) Even if you build new routes for those people, the amortized cost per user you can fit in the train is going to go way up.
Who said anything about everyone using a foldable bike (all bikes are portable)?
Your first argument was that people couldn’t use public transport because of the last mile issue. That only affects a subset of passengers and is answered by folding bikes.
Your second argument is that it would impossible to operate a subway if passengers were allowed to bring a second cabin sized carry on bag on (that’s roughly how big a folded Brompton is).
Well there’s already plenty of examples where operators are already doing this successfully.
The London Underground for example operates just fine allowing folding bikes to be taken on at all times of the day.
>It makes no sense to take entire lanes out of service for the tiny minority of people who can integrate biking into their daily commute.
Cart meet horse. I believe we have to "build it and they will come." It's a 'tiny minority' (well, minority) due largely to lack of infrastructure (bike lanes, sharrowed roads with modest speed limits, &c.).
Then, you hit upon the other issue...
>And for most people in the US, public transit is not an option because you have a last mile problem at both the starting point and ending point.
America needs more transit everywhere, and maybe more importantly, we need to dissolve the notion that mass transit is not just how low-income people solve transportation.
I love meeting New Yorkers and Chicagoans and their ilk because they are already on board with transit, they just don't continue use in newCity because the coverage is inadequate.
Playing devil's advocate for the car culture we do face the fact that the USA is huge and our cities have sprawled as a result. This makes cycling end to end take way more effort and often dictates that there be some powered locomotion to cover the bulk of the distance. And that's where transport fits perfectly.
Tl;dr. There's a symbiosis that needs to happen between bikes and transit to achieve critical mass and this wider adoption in urban centers. If we find strategies that get us to that tipping point then I think wider change is possible.
(me: currently commute by bike-bus-bike and previously did bike only (26 miles/day. I'll admit, the LA climate is a big help with this, no doubt.)
> America needs more transit everywhere, and maybe more importantly, we need to dissolve the notion that mass transit is not just how low-income people solve transportation.
Transit is completely impractical in almost all the places where most Americans live and work. We’re talking about a commute that starts in a suburban cul-de-sac and ends in a suburban office park. Where would you put the transit lines? There is also the issue of speed. If you have enough lines and stop to actually cover most people (it would have to be bus service, anything else would be completely unfeasible economically), the commutes would be dog slow. America has among the shortest commutes in the OECD, because our whole country is built around point-to-point car trips.
There is a saying: you won’t excel if you constantly beat your head against your weaknesses. Our country is structurally not set up for transit, and our political systems are incapable of the coordinated effort necessary to make transit work. Atlanta is never going to be walkable like Paris, any more than Paris is ever going to get an orderly street grid like Chicago. And even if you tore down Atlanta and rebuilt it as a walkable city you’ll never convince Americans to walk or bike long distances in 90 degree weather/90 percent humidity. Trying to make it so is a fool’s errand. Focus on the things America can do: electric vehicles, etc.
> Transit is completely impractical in almost all the places where most Americans live and work. We’re talking about a commute that starts in a suburban cul-de-sac and ends in a suburban office park. Where would you put the transit lines?
Again, chicken and egg. You need density to get to a point where non-car commutes are practical, and you won't get that as long as you build car-first.
It wouldn't be practical to turn the whole country into Manhattan overnight. But at every level there are steps that localities can take to make things marginally better: permitting higher density housing, permitting housing and offices to be built close together, reducing or eliminating street parking.
And the various bits of better cycling or transit infrastructure add up: add secure bike parking to the office park and a few hardy souls will start cycling, then you'll gain more value from adding bike lanes, which in turn will get more people switching and then more extensive infrastructure becomes more affordable. Start giving buses priority at lights and more people take the bus, then it becomes more practical to build rail lines along the busiest corridors, and so on.
> our political systems are incapable of the coordinated effort necessary to make transit work.
Political systems are made up of people, and as the newer generation takes over the system responds to their wants. Many people want denser neighbourhoods and better transit and they are - slowly but surely - starting to get them.
> And even if you tore down Atlanta and rebuilt it as a walkable city you’ll never convince Americans to walk or bike long distances in 90 degree weather/90 percent humidity.
Sounds like a similar climate to Hong Kong, which is famously low-car.
No doubt many parts of the US will not have great transit for centuries. But that's not a reason to avoid building it in the places where it will work. If you look at many places that are now famously low-car, there was a similar level of skepticism when they first started introducing bike lanes etc..
> Again, chicken and egg. You need density to get to a point where non-car commutes are practical, and you won't get that as long as you build car-first.
The simple fact that you're missing is that the country is already built.
Every day parts of it get rebuilt. To continue to be successful a country needs to be willing to change and evolve, and that might occasionally involve a little bit of planning and creating forward-looking infrastructure that will become gradually more useful over time.
Yes, and people used to dump sewage in the streets before we developed sewage systems. The whole point I'm making is that "status quo" is a terrible excuse for something.
I know that voters are generally a pretty toxic cocktail of stupid and self-interested[1], but what I was describing is that IME pro-car issues tend to be a whole nother level, where the fig leaf of pretending to care about the tradeoffs of the costs to society of one's actions is entirely dropped.
> Public transit is viable when your cities look like New York or Chicago. You put a little train station in a walkable/bikeable suburb, and then put all the jobs downtown. Most post-WWII cities don’t look anything like that. In those cities, it’s entirely rational to cater primarily to cars, because most people couldn’t use public transit and biking even if they wanted to.
Absolutely agree that cars have an important place in any transportation system; I'm not some pro-transit zealot that wants to ban cars and make everyone in the suburbs take buses[2].
But if you've paid any attention to any transportation policy discussions anywhere in the country, it'd be clear that that's not what I'm talking about: the fetish for cars rears its head all along the spectrum of density, including in the densest, most transit-suited parts of the country. We're a million miles away from a level-headed analysis of the costs, benefits, and feasibility of different transportation systems, and that's largely driven by the collective idiocy/selfishness of pro-car voters. Look at any transpo discussion in public or in private, and the status quo bias means that people systematically downplay and ignore the costs of car- and parking-centric policy while systematically exaggerating those of transit, bike lanes etc. (this isn't even close to balanced out by the horrific mismanagement of our big transit project boondoggles).
[1] To be clear, self-interest is a normal and important part of democratic decision-making; what I'm describing here is the subjective point past which we as a society consider the damage done to society from individual self-interest to be unusually selfish.
[2] though you're mistaken about the binary of requiring high density for transit to be useful: the Northeast is a perfect example of lower levels of density than NYC/Chicago making good use of things like commuter rail, often in concert with cars)
Consider, as an ironic example, the new development around DC’s New Carrolton metro station, where WMATA, DC’s subway operator, will have a major office. Although it is a metro stop, it’s not practically commutable by metro. Almost all of the housing in the area is outside walking distance from the station, and it would make no sense to live in the city (where the rent is very expensive and the schools are bad) and take metro when you could live in the surrounding suburbs and drive 15 minutes to work instead. This is a problem endemic to the US—because we put large employment centers in the suburbs (like Silicon Valley) we end up with suburb-suburb commutes with last mile problems at both ends. It kills transit and biking as viable options.
Public transit is viable when your cities look like New York or Chicago. You put a little train station in a walkable/bikeable suburb, and then put all the jobs downtown. Most post-WWII cities don’t look anything like that. In those cities, it’s entirely rational to cater primarily to cars, because most people couldn’t use public transit and biking even if they wanted to.